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Last updated on: May 22, 2010 at 3:26 am by Cathleen Falsani

2010-05-22T03:26:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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GODSTUFF

HARD-WIRED FOR GOODNESS

In the creation story in the biblical Book of Genesis, after God created fish and sea creatures, birds and animals — including the hilariously odd duck-billed platypus — and pronounced them “good,” God created human beings and declared that they were “very good.”

If it is true that God thinks human beings are very good, indeed, what might it mean to our understanding of sin, evil, our relationship with one another and with God?

God’s goodness and the inherent goodness of all of God’s creation — including you and me — is the subject of Made for Goodness and Why This Makes a Difference, a new book co-written by the Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and his youngest daughter, Mpho Tutu, who, like her father, is an Anglican priest.

Human beings are “hard-wired” for goodness, the Tutus assert in their book.

“We are fundamentally good,” father and daughter write. “We are tuned to the key of goodness. This is not to deny evil; it is to face evil squarely. And we can face evil squarely because we know evil will not have the last word.”

Embracing our inherent goodness does not mean endless striving to “be good” or “do good,” the Tutus insist.

“Goodness is not the coin with which we anxiously pay for God’s love,” they write. “’Being good’ is the wrong goal. Attached to that notion of ‘being good’ are all the ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ that we think will win us the prize we truly crave: God’s love and divine favor. We are wearing ourselves out in a quest to buy what is already ours: God’s unmerited love.

“God does that even for the ones that we call bad people, evil people. God is as intimate with them as God is intimate with the most saintly. There is not a single person that God gives up on, because God knows that we are made to be like God, who is goodness itself.”

(You can watch a video of Mpho and Desmond Tutu discussing their book HERE.)

The Tutu’s take on the nature of humankind — that we are deeply and inherently good because that is precisely how God created us— flies in the face of some schools of Christian theology that teach the “total depravity” of humans.

“What that takes as the starting point for who we are is sinful,” Mpho Tutu said in an interview from her office in Washington, D.C. “It says that the thing that is most important about us — the thing that is our most essential quality — is sinfulness and wrongness. It seems to me that it’s a warped kind of God who is going to create a creature that can never satisfy.

“It’s as if a God who can create whatever God desires decides that the thing I’m going to create is the thing that most annoys me,” she said. “That doesn’t compute. Yes we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but that’s not what is essential in us or what is essential about us. What is essential about us is that we are capable of living into the best that we are.”

Such an approach to the relationship between God and God’s human creatures may lead some to understand Jesus’ life and mission on Earth differently. Perhaps, as the Bible claims, Jesus became human, lived and died among us not because God required a sacrificial atonement, but because God knew Jesus’ sacrifice was the best way to demonstrate to our limited human imagination just how much God loves us.

“Precisely,” said Mpho Tutu, who was ordained in 2004 by her father. “We as human beings have a tendency… to get a hold of the wrong end of the story. We start the story at the end and work backwards, instead of starting the story at the beginning and working forward. If we do start the story at the beginning and work forward, we begin from God who was good creating us out of God’s love for us. We mess up along the way and God says, ‘No, I want to show you what is possible. This is possible. Living as human beings out of your goodness, out of your innate goodness, is possible.’ And comes to show us that, for Christians, in the pattern of Jesus Christ.”

Because Jesus lived a full human existence — with all of its joys and wonder, pain and struggles — temptation is not just a notion to God, Tutu said. After Jesus’ baptism, according to biblical accounts, the Spirit of God led him into the wilderness where he faced the Tempter. Jesus felt the seductive appeal of temptation, and chose not to give in.

“We don’t face temptations in the face of a God who has no idea what that means,” she said. “We face temptation held in the tender hand of a God who knows what temptation feels like to us … and who also knows that, yeah, it is possible to resist. It is possible to turn around and walk away.”

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